부산대학교 도서관

The host of modern society’s economic activity has changed from production oriented suppliers to consumption oriented consumers. Also, the social, political and cultural environment of daily life consumption is experiencing many changes, due to the changes of market economy’s environment, globalization and internationalization.Therefore, consumers are not only required to seek their personal satisfaction through consumption choice, but also required to participate in ‘responsible social activity’, which starts from an understanding of what kinds of local, economical, social, cultural and political results they give to the society he/she lives by their consumption choice. Some Chinese brands have no problem with their product’s quality, because they already reached the global advanced standards in certain fields. However, when the Chinese government and enterprises only focused on economic growth, they disregarded social security function, leading to appearance of many social harms including environmental pollution, corruption and the widening of rich-poor gap etc. Therefore, when a foreign consumer tries to purchase a Chinese product, he/she places more emphasis on “whether the Chinese enterprise’s action has legitimacy” rather than “whether this product is worth purchasing.” Legitimacy is a sort of a general cognition, which is to measure if an organization’s action corresponds with the society’s desire, propriety and appropriateness, based on the modern society’s standard, values, belief and justice.1) pragmatic legitimacy: It is the scale of judgement to measure if a local product or a local brand satisfies the stakeholder’s actual profit demand. Because of this, enterprises are required to obey the rules of market exchange system, making the enterprises constantly care about both satisfying maximum profit to the stakeholder and successfully promoting local product’s image. 2) social legitimacy: It judges the suitability of the local product and the actions of the local brand, based on the social mainstream culture and regulations. It makes the enterprises to obey the local’s culture, system and social norm, and the enterprises must promote the local products image by various types of PR and communication. The perception of “rightness” in the public’s subconscious is generally combined with the merits of people and society. Therefore the two concepts do have distinction, but they are not completely independent. Based on the preceding research, this paper studied the influence of country image, corporate image and brand image on brand preference, and also researched about what kind of adjustment function does Korean consumers’ tendency of legitimacy do, when understanding Chinese products. As a result, it appeared that country image, corporate image and brand image all had positive effect on brand preference. Legitimacy appeared to have moderating effects in influential relationship between corporate image and brand preference, and between brand image and brand preference. It also appeared that the moderating effect in influential relationship was the largest between corporate image and brand preference. No moderating effects appeared in influential relationship between country image and brand preference.